


Monsters

by BreakfastTea



Category: Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997), Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, Shinra Company
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:34:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24810895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BreakfastTea/pseuds/BreakfastTea
Summary: Cloud wakes up alone in the Sector Seven lab. He's got to find Tifa and Barret.He just needs to get past the monsters; both the ones in his head and the ones in the abandoned lab.
Comments: 24
Kudos: 109





	Monsters

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to Fanfic Friday Week 4 :D First FFVII fic requested, and it's another story for Nuwandae :D 
> 
> This is set in the Remake universe with blink and you'll miss it nods to both the 1997 original and Crisis Core.

That smell. It hadn’t changed. Mako. The sharp, acrid tang crawled into him, obscuring his thoughts, weighing him down. Cloud opened his eyes and saw nothing but darkness. His hands reached out, only to hit glass. Sluggish fear went through him. Wrong. This was wrong. Where was he? He couldn’t remember why he was… how he’d been...

The smell. It swarmed around him in a thick, nauseating green fog. Brought whispers and sounds and –

_Monsters of SOLDIERS._

Creatures slithered out of the green fog, clawed hands shining, dripping. Mouths dropped open, showing vicious teeth. They pressed their glistening hands against the glass separating Cloud from them. He pushed back, but he had nowhere to go. He was trapped, in the glass tube.

No. No, no, no. This couldn’t be happening. Not…

Not again.

He shot to his feet as the liquid mako poured in. He thumped the glass tube holding him.

The monsters thumped back.

The mako rose.

Reached his waist.

His chest.

His chin.

Closed over his head.

He couldn’t breathe.

No, no, no! Out. He had to get out. His fist punched the glass.

A claw punched harder. A terrible, bestial roar cut through the mako. The monster outside was hungry, angry. It punched through. Closed a claw around his wrist. Pulled him into darkness and –

Cloud jolted awake, gasping for air. Head thumping, body aching, he looked around and saw himself surrounded by rubble and walkways. He could smell smoke and dust. And with that came the memory.

Sector Seven. Crushed beneath the plate. Looking for Wedge. Finding him, and then…

Falling.

Darkness.

Cloud flipped to his feet, staggering as his head swam. He looked around. No Tifa. No Barret. Just Shinra cargo boxes and a whole lot of rubble. Shit. Where were they? They must’ve been separated during the fall. A fall into what? Into where? This place reeked of Shinra.

Anxiety made him dizzier, and he had to lean against the wall. He pressed a hand to his aching head. Get it together. He didn’t have time for weakness. Not now, not ever.

Yet this place set his teeth on edge. He couldn’t think why. It chimed with something deep, deep in his memory.

Tch. No point worrying. His memory was full of holes these days.

He pulled in a deep breath, wincing at the smoke and the chemical tang slithering beneath it. Mako. How he loathed it. And not just because of that nightmare. It went so much further than that, beyond any memory. It was ingrained in him. A deep, dark fear. Because it was fear, no matter how much he denied it. Mako enhancement for him wasn’t something to be happy about. He just couldn’t really remember why.

He tried not to think about that. He tried not to think about a lot of things these days. The hallucinations. The nightmares. The headaches. The amnesia.

What was it that President Shinra had said? SOLDIERs always suffered degradation. They all knew it, and they all accepted it. Maybe this was the start of his inevitable decline.

Enough. Cloud took his pain and fear and crushed it. Sucking in a deep breath, he closed his eyes, waited for his head to settle, and pulled himself upright. He needed to find the others, fast. This place had Shinra lab written all over it. It made his skin crawl. Nothing good ever came out of a hellhole like this. They needed to get out of here, fast. Before…

Before…

“Fuck.”

The memory lurked, just out of reach. Panic swam through him. Everything in him screamed to get out before it was too late.

Fine. He could do that. But not without Tifa and Barret.

Cloud moved, heading down a corridor lined with hundreds of Shinra branded crates. Some looked brand new. Others were rusted. A memory flashed through him, a memory of carrying the crates like that while someone shouted at him to move faster, the shipment needed to leave the city and –

It was gone again.

Cloud kept going. He found a set of massive doors. He grabbed the handles.

And heard a distant roar.

Because a Shinra lab had to have monsters lurking in its dark depths.

_…den of monsters…_

Whatever lurked down here, Cloud wouldn’t let it kill him or the others. He threw the doors open and raised one hand to his sword, ready for anything.

Ahead of him were cages. Cages upon cages. Empty now, but Cloud could picture what had been in them all too clearly.

Monsters.

Prisoners.

Experiments.

His head gave a warning ache. Cloud paused. It didn’t get worse. He took a deep breath, wincing at the stench of rot and rust. His fragmented memories would have to wait. Maybe he’d wanted to work for Shinra when he’d been a stupid, naïve kid. He knew better now. He didn’t need the actual memories to know Shinra needed to be stopped. Barret wasn’t wrong about that.

Not that Cloud would tell the man that in so many words.

Every sense on edge, every muscle tensed and ready for a fight, Cloud followed a walkway between the cages. He kept his footsteps light, not wanting to disturb anything lurking in the shadows. If he could get through this place without fighting whatever the hell roared in the distance, it’d be better than the alternative. They’d already fallen through the ground into this place. No telling how much more would come falling down if they weren’t careful.

Cloud’s eyes took in every detail of his surroundings. The technology down here seemed archaic. Definitely older than anything he’d seen during his time with Shinra. This lab had been down here a long, long time. And based on the amount of dust and the number of sealed shut doors he came across, Shinra had abandoned it a decade ago, if not longer than that. Still, if they had a lab beneath Sector Seven, they probably had similar setups in other sectors.

Which left him wondering what the hell would they have in the Shinra Building?

At the top of a staircase, Cloud finally found a door that opened. He stepped through into yet another hallway. Something caught his eye. He looked down.

Blood.

Old, thankfully, but blood. A trail of it, leading down the dark corridor. The lights overhead flickered on and off, some of them swinging on wires. There had been a battle here a long time ago, the memory of it scarring the old lab. In the dim light, Cloud made out the sight of countless bullet holes in the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Standard Shinra bullets from standard infantry weaponry, based on the size of the holes. Cloud ran his hand over the walls.

Something had escaped. Something big.

The corridor continued around a bend. Cloud kept going.

His boot hit something. It crunched underfoot. Cloud looked down.

Bone. Human bone.

Cloud could see teeth marks on it.

The light flickered. Died. Cloud held himself still. Nothing stirred. His eyesight adjusted, picking up the details of what lay ahead. Because it wasn’t just one bone.

There was a large pile in front of him. It almost touched the ceiling.

The light flickered back to full, bright life.

Bodies. Some skeletons, some mummified. Still in lab coats. Still in infantry uniforms. Still in SOLDIER uniforms. They’d died, and then they’d been tossed down here, abandoned.

Anger simmered in Cloud’s chest. Shinra really didn’t give a shit about anything except money and power.

The white coats though… Scientists…

His vision fuzzed. The lab morphed into something else. Somewhere else. Smaller. Colder. Machines surrounded him, surrounded the bed he was strapped to.

Pain lingered in every part of his body, radiating from his torso. Sweat drenched him. He looked at the masked, white-coated figures staring down at him. “Let me up. Let me go.”

_“You should be thanking us. When we’re finished with you, you’ll be better than ever. You’ll be stronger, faster…”_

Their voices blurred together into a whispering choir. He tried to tug himself free, but the straps had no give.

The figures stepped back.

Another man stepped up.

Him.

He cackled, tapping his glasses up his nose. “Let’s begin.”

Hojo. It was Hojo. Hojo who pulled a massive syringe out from behind his back, who –

An ear-splitting roar brought Cloud back to the present. He was on his knees, the pain in his head slowly subsiding. His heart pounded in his chest, his stomach churning. He heaved, but nothing came up.

Breathe. He needed to breathe. Calm down. Regain his focus. If his thoughts went back to Hojo (bastard!), Cloud wrenched them away.

He had to find Tifa and Barret, now. He didn’t have time for the past. He never, ever, had time for the flashbacks that attacked without warning. He was needed now. He didn’t have time to worry about why his head was so fucked up. There was too much to do, too much to manage. If he stopped to really, properly, think about why his memory was so monumentally chaotic, he’d probably fall apart.

A bitter laugh broke out of him. Honesty with himself, huh? That was new.

Cloud left the bodies in their pitiful pile and shoved his way through another set of doors. He found himself on another walkway, high above another room full of cages. Old, rusting security mechs patrolled. Cloud cut them down, clearing his path. He didn’t waste energy with magic. The old machines didn’t pose any kind of issue. No one had done any maintenance on these things in years. It was a miracle they worked at all.

A testament to Shinra engineering. Cloud snorted. They might be monstrous bastards, but Shinra knew how to build to last.

Reaching the end of the walkway, Cloud hit a snag. A sealed door snag. Fuck this. He wasn’t going back and finding another way. Stepping back, he focused on his Firaga materia. Two seconds later, the door was a memory and Cloud stepped through into another curving corridor. Except this one came with a difference. Namely, very familiar looking bullet holes. And not Shinra familiar this time.

Barret. Trust him to leave his own version of a breadcrumb trail. Smiling to himself, Cloud followed it to yet another walkway over a set of cells. How far under Sector Seven did this place go? This cavernous lab had no end. There had to be miles of cages. The logistics boggled Cloud’s mind. There was no way Shinra could’ve filled all of these with people. Someone would’ve noticed.

Except Shinra controlled the media, along with everything else.

A flicker of fear gnawed at his stomach. How the hell could they fight people capable of creating something like this, let alone a company that literally powered the world?

He shook himself. Another fear he needed to completely ignore.

It wasn’t long before he could hear the familiar sounds of gunfire and yelling. Barret and Tifa yelling. Relief flooded Cloud and he picked up the pace. He burst through another doorway and found them battling creatures far below.

He’d seen something like this before, hadn’t he? Or heard about them?

_You should’ve seen them, Cloud. They should’ve been SOLDIERs, but they’d mutated. Like… like weird, blue lizards still shaped like people. There were so many. So, so many in that reactor. How long has Shinra experimented on people?_

Turning his back on the memory, Cloud moved, leaping into action and cutting the enormous mutant down. He crushed his feelings just as he crushed the monster. Crushed them, right until Barret shot down a crumbling wall and revealed the darkest corner of the lab.

Because there were the tubes. Empty of mako, they still contained the desiccated bodies of the unlucky test subjects.

“Yeah, that’s the Shinra I know,” Cloud said.

_Out. He wanted out._

_No one came. No one let him out._

_He drowned in mako._

“Cloud?” Tifa asked.

He didn’t have a chance to explain the horrors he could see; both in the hidden chamber and in his own head. The phantoms rushed them, dragging them out of the lab and tossing them back into Sector Seven.

Out of one hell, and back to another. Sector Seven was a burning nightmare, but at least Wedge was alive. Wedge and his cats.

Not for the first time, Cloud wondered how a fight to stop Shinra had turned into this.

_We can’t be their victims, Cloud. You gotta fight, okay?_

Yeah, he could fight. He would fight. He was going to bring Shinra to their knees. It didn’t matter how huge they were, how powerful. They would fall.

Starting with that bastard Hojo.

“Come on,” Barret said. “We gotta get Wedge someplace safe.”

Cloud nodded. He knew exactly where they could go. And after that, they could go after Aerith.

And take out Shinra HQ while they were at it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'll have more FFVII fics soon :D


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